Book review: ‘The Tree House’ by Kathleen Jamie

I love Kathleen Jamie’s prose writing so much that I’ve even taken to reading her poetry. That’s right: me, reading poetry. As with her prose, I greatly enjoyed her poetry collection The Overhaul for its no-nonsense, unpretentious, unromantic take on the natural world, and our place in it. This earlier volume is more of the same.

As with The Overhaul, a small number of the poems included in The Tree House were in Scots dialect. These did nothing for me, although I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the target audience. But I enjoyed the other poems very much indeed. I particularly liked one about kittiwake feathers found washed up on a beach, and how studying individual feathers can’t tell you much about the birds as a whole.

A lovely book.